Tell me something I don’t know about working with Elizabeth Olsen.
I call her the machine. That was my nickname for her. Lizzie is one of, if not the most, prepared actors I’ve ever worked with. Her level of focus and preparation is truly impressive. Sometimes she had 10-page scenes with a lot of dialogue and really heavy emotion, and she would come and do almost all of them in one take, and then we would move on. That is really incredible and almost never happens. Everyone would understand if we spent half a day filming some of these scenes, but she would do most of them in one take. It was super impressive.
Speaking of impressive, what’s the ballsiest thing you’ve ever done to land an audition or a job?
I don’t have one of those cool, “I broke into their house,” or, “I showed up at their barbecue,” which is borderline creepy. You ever hear one of those stories and you’re like, “What if that didn’t go well?” You know what I mean? That’s the end of your career. But the best story I have is when I was filming Ozark and also auditioning with director David Fincher for Mank. We were doing it on Zoom and had two 90-minute sessions with just him and me, reading over scenes, him giving me notes, etc. It was amazing. I felt good about it. But then a week later, my agent was like, “They’re going to start the process over for that character.” They couldn’t tell me why. I was like, “If I suck or if he…whatever. But is that the case?” They said, “No, they thought you were great.” But I understood in that moment, I need to get in his physical presence because it’s so hard to act over Zoom. I hate it.
So you broke into his house.
And crashed his barbecue. [Laughs] No, Laray Mayfield, who was casting Mank—and also cast me in Iron Fist—reached out and said, “Is there any way?” Because I had to film Ozark in Atlanta, and he’s across the country, and they were having auditions during the week. I said, “Is there any way that David would see me on a Saturday?” It was the only time I could go. Surprisingly, and thankfully, David said yes.
I finished filming Ozark about 3 a.m. on a Friday night/Saturday morning. I drove home, picked up my suitcase, went right to the airport, got on a 5 a.m. flight, flew to Los Angeles, and my friend drove me to David’s office where Gary Oldman was also waiting. We read the scenes in person and it worked out.
Well done.
I was proud of that. I was like, “You know what? This is a David Fincher movie. I’m going to exhaust all my options.”
